Sunday, January 31, 2016

The maned wolf (not a real wolf, but real enough for this blog)

This column is part of a series where Verge staffers post
highly subjective reviews of animals. Up until now, we've written about
animals without telling you whether they suck or rule. We are now
rectifying this oversight.

I know what you're thinking: "That's not a wolf! That's a fox! With elegant long stems! That's a real fox, if you see what I'm saying." Well, sorry weirdo, you're only half right.

The maned wolf is actually not a wolf, and also not a fox. It does
belong to the canidae family, so it's a distant cousin of wolves, foxes,
and domesticated dogs. It is the largest canid you can find in South
America, unless you bring your Saint Bernard there on vacation.
Obviously it looks like a fox on stilts, but that doesn't make it a fox,
okay?

The maned wolf is named such because it has... a thick black mane.
The hairdo's primary purpose is to intimidate other animals in the
grasslands our not-fox calls home. The spindly legs are also thought to
be an adaptation for these high grasses.

When I say the grasslands are the maned wolf's "home," I suppose I
should really say "fiefdom." Maned wolves hunt alone but mate for
convenience, needing a partner to help defend territories of up to 12
square miles (seems a little greedy, but okay!). They mark this
territory with some extremely stinky excretions, which is why they're
also known as "skunk wolves." Allegedly their urine smells similar to marijuana
— so much so that a busybody at a zoo in the Netherlands once called
the cops to shut down a joint-smoking youth who turned out not to exist.

The sound that the mane wolf makes is referred to as a "roar bark,"
because its appearance and smell aren't the only things that are weird
about it!

Mane wolves are native to Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay,
and require large swathes of open land, making them particularly
susceptible to the disastrous effects of habitat destruction.
Compounding the effect of shrinking habitats, when mane wolves come
closer to human settlement they are often hunted in defense of chicken
coops, which they are apt to pillage. Right now the maned
wolf's official IUCN designation
is "near threatened," but this standing is likely to slide as more and
more of South America's open grassy areas are burned for agricultural
use.

The maned wolf actually has a strained relationship with humans for a
whole bouquet of silly reasons. In Brazil, it was once fairly common to
carry maned wolf eyeballs as good luck charms,
for example. Due to their uncommon height they often take the blame
(and subsequent bullet) for killing large livestock such as cows and
sheep when in fact their small jaw size would not even permit it. Mane
wolves actually prefer to hunt small rodents, fish, and birds when they
want meat. They're also big fans of tubers, and a fruit called the "wolf
apple," which is similar to a tomato. They have a serious sweet tooth,
and are known to munch on sugarcane whenever they can.

A fully grown maned wolf really looks like it wants you dead, so
even tough they don't pose any particular threat to humans, they're
often hunted for sport. We kill things we're scared of — it's kind of
our thing!

Augsburg Zoo / Oliver Feller

The maned wolf is a misunderstood beauty, with very little in common with most of its closest relatives. In fact, a recent study points to the extinct dusicyon genus as the maned wolf's next of kin. The Falkland Islands wolf was
the last living species in this genus, but was hunted and poisoned into
extinction in 1876 by sheep farmers and fur trappers. At this point
they're without a friend in the world, save for the leafcutter ants
who use their poop to fertilize tiny fungus gardens. In exchange, the
ants drop seeds from the poop just outside their nests, where they're
likely to germinate and grow in the ants' nutrient-rich "trash" piles.
Nice!

The best thing about these unfairly vilified not-wolves is that they
give birth to uncommonly darling babies, which look like they belong in
my home with me, if you want my opinion! I will check back in to see if
they're interested once I've acquired a 10 million square foot house.

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone